Businesses and organizations are becoming increasingly reliant on computers to facilitate lobbying, membership roster building, telemarketing, and other processes which require accumulation of data regarding large numbers of people, as well as communication with them. Databases have been created to store, for example, information on particular consumers' habits and personal tastes when purchasing services and goods. The information is subsequently used by retailers and marketing businesses to identify consumers who may be interested in receiving advertisements on a particular product or service, or may welcome a telephone call from a salesperson for that item. Membership drives and lobbying also require accumulation of data on various persons in order to selectively contact certain people by telephone or mail to join a particular organization or to support a particular political cause or candidate.
Computers such as mainframe computers and personal computers and software programs are presently being used to create databases for storing the information described above and to manipulate it for various purposes. For example, U.S. Pat. No. 4,209,845 to Berger et al. discloses a file qualifying and sorting system which can be used to retrieve names, addresses and variable text from a memory device. The retrieved information is then automatically merged with form letter text. U.S. Pat. No. 5,297,245 to Kitamura et al. discloses an address data management system for reducing key operation and the likelihood of erroneously imputing data into a database. If a record to be entered into the database is suspected of being similar to an entered record immediately preceding it, the operator can press a button to recall the preceding record to a display screen. The operator then need only enter the information that differs between the two records. Also, records from the database can be searched and retrieved from the database if they satisfy one or more selected conditions.